Amuse-Douche

Gordon Ramsay used to be merely a world-renowned chef. Now, thanks to Hell's Kitchen, he's America's angriest, funniest, most flatout foulmouthed realityTV star. Why are we gobbling it up

Odds are you've had to cop this plea yourself if your own love shack is anything like mine, so feel free to join in on harmonica. She got me watching that Bravo crap, and even now I only sit through Project Runway to be sociable. Sure, I also kind of think I want Heidi Klum to hurt me, but what's so freaky about that Freaky would be if I still felt steamed because secondseason finalist Santino Rice—I mean, what'shisname—was robbed.

Even when what the judges call haute cuisine looks more like what I call Frank Gehry turned loose on condiments, I can manage Top Chef, too, since Padma Lakshmi is pretty fetching. You know, in that aloof, minorModigliani way that makes you want Heidi to hurt her. But Shear Genius—sorry, no can do. Once I've got Santa's reject elves coming at me with combs and that weird Jonestown look starts glazing Mrs. Critic's peepers, wild horses couldn't stop me from bailing to the other set and the first shoot'emup I find. There are limits, and sometimes a man's gotta view what a man's gotta view.

So take it from someone who's been to the well that Hell's Kitchen, whose fourth season wrapped up this summer, is different. For one thing, it isn't on Bravo. It isn't even on the Food Network, where they miss Emeril Lagasse's vogue the way Sacco missed Vanzetti. Hell's Kitchen airs on slovenly Fox, a network that doesn't do froufrou. Thanks to food TV's trustiest improvised explosive device, riggedtoblow Brit celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, it's also a show that guys like me would tune in to even if we had the house to ourselves and our inner Borgnine was calling the shots.

By most accounts, Ramsay really is up there with the alltime great cooks. In his teens, however, his big love was soccer, not saucepans, which explains a lot. Maybe it's been a while since he was built like a gypsy's dog, to quote his own flavorful recollection of the Gordon that was. But even though the knee injury that did in his World Cup dreams sent him to catering school instead, clearly nobody told him that he had to change his attitude.

Or his vocabulary, since he drops bleeped Fbombs randomly enough to make the pilots who incinerated Dresden look choosy. Back in Merrie Olde, Ramsay's readings of the riot act to cowering kitchen crews have been the stuff of ratings gold ever since his careermaking turn in Boiling Point, a late'90s UK miniseries that documented our hero's scrappy bid to win three Michelin stars at his first eponymous restaurant. By now his ever expanding network of upscale chophouses stretches from Tokyo to Dubai. For all I know, it's been years since he's so much as boned a bird in any of them, but who needs Michelin when you've got Nielsen

Since I take my Ramsay fis where I find them, in between Hell's Kitchen seasons I'll settle for its lesser Fox spinoff, Kitchen Nightmares. Forget the depiction of Martha Stewart as a serial killer that just popped into your head: Kitchen Nightmares is more like Shane set in food land. Why it isn't called Home on the Range beats me, but there's nothing like reality TV for sticking old myths in unlikely new bottles.

In this incarnation, Ramsay still spews vitriol by the gallon. But now, rumbling into view like Steve McQueen in chef's whites, he's the valiant guy we root for as he comes to the rescue of another greasy spoon so demoralized that even its cockroaches could use cheering up. Half scourge and half shrink, he breaks down what the joint is doing wrong, from impractical menus and prefab ingredients to the dysfunctional personal dynamics between owners and staff. Then he issues his marching orders to get things on track, Gordonstyle.

Since nobody would watch if he were lovable or even polite about it, of course the slackers, cornercutting slobs, and pieinthesky dreamers whose businesses he's saving resent his interference. Tempers flare, resentments simmer, egos get sautéed. But once they've seen the error of their ways, and the place has gotten a jazzy new makeover (an inducement whose role in getting the restaurateurs to play ball the show softpedals considerably), the reopening is all bouquets. At which point Gordon sets his jaw, adjusts his collar, and stalks into the night, his only reward besides Fox megabucks the knowledge that he's done these godforsaken homesteaders—sorry, hashslingers—some good. He hasn't just saved their bacon, folks: He's given them back their selfrespect. Dammit, he's taught them pride.

Whether or not his interventions succeed, the little islands of lost souls we meet are a window into the delusional pathos of sadsack Americana, culinary subdivision. Last year's blue ribbon for how to cook your goose went to one bornloser's lament for the berserk menu he thought would make him a franchise king before Ramsay nid it: “Whether he thought it was good food or bad food, it was unique.” If that doesn't rate a spot in any anthology of plaintive, great American bleats, I don't know what does. It's also no surprise to learn that, confirming Ramsay's own glum hunch, this touchingly muleheaded refugee from an Arthur Miller play slid back to his old ways soon after the camera crews vamoosed.

To Ramsay's credit, he isn't offering the alsorans on Kitchen Nightmares a shortcut to the big leagues, just showing them how to make a modest go of it. The trick is that that's enough to let him posture week in and week out as the last sensible man left standing in a world gone mad, but he's much tougher on Hell's Kitchen's gnarly crews of Cordon Bleu wannabes. That's because they've shown the gumption to try for the brass ring, giving him license to put them through the wringer in ways any NFL rookie could relate to.

In the league where he's a reallife marquee name, talent without the ability to perform under pressure would leave you up the same creek as a medic who can't stand the sight of blood. So the point is to test the contestants' mettle in approximately professional conditions—namely, dinner service in a mockup version of one of Ramsay's restaurants. True, the diners are Fox stooges, but any sports fan knows how football coaches feel about exhibition games. Time after time, Ramsay's wrath at a badly cooked beef Wellington has given me a new appreciation of how hobbled John Madden was by being inarticulate and shy.

Gastronomes have always enjoyed belonging to the snootiest subculture this side of the College of Cardinals, and at least some of them must be as appalled to see gourmet cooking morph into showbiz for the masses as opera buffs were when the Three Tenors packed Giants Stadium. But that's just why it's entertaining to watch Ramsay turn one of the simper set's most exclusive refuges—bon appétit and so forth—into a way for villagers to storm the castle. His own eateries may be highend enough that the day I shell out to eat in one is the day they put sauced flying pig on the menu, but one of his great saving graces is that he isn't a snob.

At the same time, it's a safe bet that the show's standin customers are encouraged to be finicky. That they and not some panel of experts are the ones whose displeasure has to be avoided at all costs is the show's smartest wrinkle, since the justification for Ramsay's abusiveness is that the great Gordon is doing all this for…us. And for the wannabes' own benefit, not that they appreciate it until their reward for winning a challenge includes downtime with the man himself. Then he turns on the debonair charm, proving it's been tough love all along.

Since he made his own foursquare rep by doing the classics perfectly, not thinking up new ways to torment food, he's also got no patience with fetishizing cuisine for cuisine's sake. While Bravo all but croons that the way to Padma's heart is a meal she can wear as a hat, in Ramsay's world you disrespect the integrity of a New York strip steak at your peril. The contestants do get to quailingly submit their proudest selfdevised concoctions for his appraisal, but at crunch time they're working from Gordon's menu—whose dishes aren't especially exotic, from Dover sole to risotto. They're just a real bitch to cook well enough to get past him to the dining room.

Split into red and blue teams until attrition does its thing, the show's answers to Ratatouille's Remy are a scruffier crew than Top Chef's feline Culinary Institute of America grads. They're shortorder cooks who dream of going long, caterers who've had it with putting the bar in bar mitzvah, the girl who kept on having to explain in high school that her love of jerked chicken wasn't a metaphor. The hardscrabble streak in their bid for the big time is matched by the selfmade Ramsay's bootstrap sympathies. He'll chew them out six ways to Zagat's if they don't measure up, but he never condescends to their ambitions.

That's to his credit, too. But even so, sophisticated dude that I am, I stayed baffled that my inner Borgnine was getting off on a furshlugginer competitivecooking show until I realized my inner 12yearold was the perp. Those sullen or pathetic misfits getting badgered into shape, that topkick who keeps riding them because he knows the ordeals ahead—aw man, no wonder I enjoy Hell's Kitchen. The first time I saw it, it was called The Dirty Dozen.

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